May 16, 2018 AT 7:00 am

Sleep Reader Headband #WearableWednesday

Have you ever wondered how you sleep at night? Devices like FitBit track sleep by analyzing your movement throughout the night, but they can’t look at what your brain is doing.

After a semester of learning about medical instrumentation, our class was challenged with the task of creating a wearable device to measure some biological variable. My partner and I chose to develop a headband that can look at what your brain does while asleep. The headband reads brain wave signals to monitor sleep patterns. It identifies how the user’s brain waves progress through alpha, beta, gamma, and delta phases during the night. The data can then be exported and analyzed in Excel.

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

"When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don’t have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you" - Pablo Picasso